


The Hours: Clogston

by orphan_account



Category: Discworld - Pratchett, The Hours - Cunningham
Genre: F/F, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2006-02-22
Updated: 2006-02-22
Packaged: 2017-10-10 06:18:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 737
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/96538
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
      <p>I drew a picture of Mal, Polly and Clogston based on the poster for The Hours, the film version, and I don't know how but this happened.</p>
    </blockquote>





	The Hours: Clogston

**Author's Note:**

> I drew a picture of Mal, Polly and Clogston based on the poster for The Hours, the film version, and I don't know how but this happened.

_"Someone has to die so that others will appreciate life more."_

At first Chris had thought they were different sort of men, not like the ones back home, who were all hardened and tanned by heavy work and solid eating. Some men, she'd thought, were just a little softer in places, a little smoother, a little paler. And she thinks some of them are, certainly some of them must be – because there can't possibly be that many who are like her.

(Steven was soft and small and smooth, a beautiful boy with a rueful smile that said he knew everything and would tell you nothing.)

She's afraid she spotted "Nikolai" the first time she saw her. Skinny thing, she was, her hip's sharp angle bunching the white regulation pants, dark eyes with something lost and resolute in their expression.

"She was dressed in proper military attire," Chris argued, that chilly early spring day in court, "handed out to her at the barracks by a corporal. The army cannot first dress a soldier and then complain of her attire!"

Sometimes Chris regretted that Nikki had been discovered, because now Chris couldn't come out as a woman herself, even if it she could argue herself out of a sentence. But that was all right, in the end. People are people, and she'd already got used to being a he.

Steven said he'd always known she'd find herself a woman in the end. Chris said she'd always known he'd find one first, and he had.

(They'd had one summer together, Steven and her, cornered as they'd been in the valley of Topf – one summer of waiting for a fight that never came – one summer of hunting, and swimming, and barely contained military anarchy – one summer, a month-long field day, a holiday amongst the remnants of a war that was decided somewhere miles away. One morning in those forty stood in her memory, when smoke was rising in the far horizon, and she'd stood watching it by their tent. He'd played a harmonica by the fire, badly, and called her Miss Secret-keeper, Sergeant Keyholder. She'd called him Lieutanent Lunatic, and sat down next to him, and kissed him there by the fire, pushing away the harmonica, pushing away the secrecy. That was her moment. That was the truest of all her happinesses. Nikki knows, of course. Nikki knows everything.)

Steven was twenty years ago, Nikki's been there for fifteen, and Steven's not been the same since the battle of the Keep. It was the gash at his side. He's not walking straight anymore, pulled down by his own scar tissue. He seemed all right at first. Everything seemed all right at first.

But Steven bent in on himself, and not just in stature. He bent deeper in, when Ron left, and when he was given an honourable discharge, and when his room in the capital began to fill up with empties and cigarette smoke thicker than air.

"It's the Veteran's Day," Chris would argue. "You have to be there on Veteran's Day." It became, over the years, "It's your book's publishing day," or, "It's my wedding, Steven."

Sometimes he'd come, stay for a couple of hours, get stinking drunk and insult the guests.

"Miss Secret-keeper," he called her, that one day she'd come to clean and dress him for Veteran's Day, and he'd smiled a wan smile. Chris would never know how much love was behind that smile. Maybe he wasn't even thinking about her then, or that moment that summer, if he even remembered it. "Miss Keyholder." He would have had something else on his mind, then, Chris told herself afterwards, walking home from the military hospital in stupor. He would have been thinking of the morphine overdose already snaking through his veins.

These are the moments our lives are made up of. A goddess in a crumbling ballroom, a harmonica in the brief summer morning chill, a smile shadowed in cigarette smoke and narcotics.

That night she made love to Nikki, and Nikki made love to her, and she could feel every touch like paradise on her skin, in her belly, between her thighs. "Oh gods," she'd moan. "I'm sorry." For not feeling this way for such a long time, oh my love. "Love you." _Love you, Nikki. I'm so sorry. _

Steven was in her dreams sometimes, with his wan smile. Sometimes she let him play with the key. 

 

 


End file.
